SUN Mobility has launched an open-architecture battery-swapping network in Kenya with Vivo Energy as the primary partner, more than 10 vehicle partners, and a five-year plan for 2,500 stations. It is the first serious attempt to build an energy layer in Africa that belongs to nobody’s vehicle.
It is the start of August, and I am at SUN Mobility’s offices somewhere in Whitefield in Bangalore. I have just completed a very informative factory tour, and now I am sitting across from Chetan Maini.
The man, the legend.
For the uninitiated, and if you’re not from India, Chetan created India’s first electric car, the Reva. Looking back now, the Reva does appear minuscule and was more of a quadricycle than a real car. But it was India’s first electric car by far, much before Maruti and Mahindra discovered BYD. Many Revas still ply in Bangalore. Chetan would then export the Reva as the G-Wiz to the UK, much to the annoyance of Jeremy Clarkson.
Later on, Maini would sell the business to Mahindra, where it became the foundation of Mahindra’s EV foray. A few years down the line, Chetan set up SUN Mobility to solve the more fundamental, more grassroots problem of mass e-mobility. An engineer by heart, Maini is now the vice-chairman at SUN and leads the technology side.
This is not the first time we are meeting. I first met him years back when I was a rookie, and Reva was already making waves.
His passion is evident. For the next 45 minutes, I am privileged to get a masterclass on batteries from Chetan. His passion for engineering is what is driving SUN Mobility. In its nine years of existence, the company has won 450 patents, all in the area of batteries, battery swapping, and battery management. They would easily count among the top five swappable battery deployers in the world, both in volume and tech. The company’s battery deployment JV in India, Indofast Energy, is energising more than 125,000 scooters today, almost all of which are used by gig workers delivering food and parcels. They have more than 2,000 swap stations in 25 cities, and we estimate that about 220,000 batteries have been deployed.
We have not heard of a single thermal runaway (kaboom!) incident even with the inherent temperament of NMC.
That design ethos pretty much sums up why Chetan Maini is so relevant for batteries today.
The Event
On 21st August 2026, SUN Mobility launched in Nairobi, with 35 battery-swapping stations live across Nairobi and Mombasa. The main deployment partner is Vivo Energy, Africa’s energy giant that operates more than 4,200 Shell and Engen service stations across 29 African markets. Theoretically, that’s 4,200 parking spaces for SUN to deploy.
The event is important. Even though SUN Mobility has been operating in Africa for some time, the launch event with 10 vehicle manufacturers present is a show of force. It is not every day that someone launches a battery-swapping network and puts ten partners on the stage, a mix of Chinese, Indian, and Italian. That Chinese bit is very relevant. Stay with me.
SUN has big ambitions for Africa. The stated five-year target is 2,500 stations and more than 160,000 vehicles across the continent, most of which are in East Africa.
The company is not an entrant testing a thesis to attract investment. SUN counts Bosch, Vitol, Indian Oil, Helios Climate, and Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) on the cap table. In 2025, it raised USD 135 million in fresh investments from Helios and PIDG, specifically to fund the African build.
What will drive the network?
Even then, the most important name on the cap table might be Vitol. They own Vivo Energy, the African energy giant that we mentioned earlier. In short, SUN Mobility is tying up with someone whose parent sits on their cap table. It is not merely a business relationship. It’s a strategic fit. It is a coming home. It is also an assurance that further expansion would not be stymied by real estate availability or a funding crunch.
SUN knows how to manage these relationships well. The SUN-Vivo relationship in Africa is a mirror image of their relationship with Indian Oil in India. The Indian public sector undertaking is the largest oil retailer in the country with more than 40,000 outlets. They are an investor in SUN Mobility and have a joint venture, Indofast Energy. The relationship is that SUN Mobility in India develops and manufactures the batteries and the swap stations. They also own the tech stack. The swap stations and batteries are sold to Indofast, which deploys them while relying on SUN Mobility’s tech stack as a service provider. Indofast collects the swapping revenues. It’s a great union, marrying the strengths of both partners.
The arrangement is not completely similar in Africa. SUN Mobility operates through its own entity and would collect swapping revenues from customers. Vivo provides the space and facilities for putting up the swap station. Importantly, as SUN points out, they are not completely dependent on Vivo. Of the 35 swap stations that they are starting with, 21 are with Vivo, and the remaining are independently set up.
The first few hundred packs have been shipped from India, but that is never a long-term solution. We’ll see a local assembly in Kenya coming up soon.
Open Architecture
Let us go back to Sun Mobility’s facility in Bangalore, where Arvind Yadav, their head of strategy, points out that they are now on their third-generation battery. The original started with 1.5 kWh, and the Gen-3, the ones with the yellow inserts, is now 2.1 kWh.
Long back, our forecast for SUN Mobility would include statements like “They would never make their own vehicles” and “They would not leave 48V” and “They would never leave NMC.”
The first two statements are still true, for now. The third, no longer.
The 2.1 kWh pack deployed in Africa and being rolled out in India is LFP, using cylindrical cells from EVE. The earlier packs used NMC pouch cells.
Over the years, the company’s packs have progressed from 1.5kWh NMC -> 2.1 kWh NMC -> 2.1 kWh LFP. All the while, the external casings and connectors have maintained uniformity. The packs are forward- and backward-compatible, and packs across generations can simultaneously charge in the swapping stations. SUN Mobility has always used blind-mate connectors.
However, the 48V system has been a non-negotiable.
I discussed the 48V issue with Ajay Goel, co-founder and CEO-International for SUN, last year when we had a sit-down in Bangalore. With most of the world outside India built around the 72V system since the Chinese love that, I was hoping to get an idea of when SUN would move to 48V.
Instead, I received a self-assured “No” from the wily ex-McKinsey consultant.
Ajay wanted the Chinese to move to him, not the other way around, and this event was a stark reminder that we should not consider any company’s traditional tech stack as a line in the sand. Things will change based on opportunities and technical evolution. SUN Mobility has managed to convince Chinese factories to build 48V-system machines that will work with its batteries.
The Ten Partners
One of SUN Mobility’s core strengths is that it makes it very easy for partners to mate with its batteries. The key to that is the ‘Dock’, an interface between the battery and the vehicle. In simple terms, the dock is a box, metal or plastic, with connectors inside the battery and a wiring harness extended from it to connect to the vehicle. It gives the vehicle manufacturer the freedom to design around the dock and not worry about the battery. The mechanical components to be designed for fixing the batteries inside the vehicle are simplified. The dock can also accommodate different battery orientations within the vehicle.
That simplification has allowed SunMobility/Indofast to work with 12 OEMs in India. Some of them, like Odysse, BGauss, and Motovolt, are coming to Africa with the battery partner. Odysse has developed a motorcycle, while BGauss and Motovolt are looking at Africa as a delivery scooter market.
Other partners include Sprocomm, Vmoto, Wylex, and Afrina NeoPower, all Chinese, who are going the extra mile to work with SUN. Both Vmoto and Wylex are established motorcycle manufacturers, redeveloping motorcycles to work with SUN’s batteries and 48V system.
This would be Vmoto’s first foray into Africa, and they are readying both a motorcycle and a large-wheeled scooter for the continent, both mated to SUN Mobility’s batteries.
Wylex is an interesting case, considering that it already deploys 72V motorcycles on Ampersand’s network. They would have two different motorcycles in Africa now.
Meanwhile, both Afrina Neopower and Sprocomm are mobile phone manufacturers, just like Transsion (Tankvolt). This would be the first time they’re building a motorcycle from scratch around SUN Mobility’s battery packs.
Then there is QJYY, QJ Motor’s brand for Africa. They are deploying a motorcycle and a three-wheeler.
Also, on the three-wheeler side is Piaggio, which is taking its e-Ape. Piaggio already supplies the vehicles for the Skoot e3W, which launched in Nairobi in February 2026 on SUN Mobility packs through distributor Car & General.
Also deploying three-wheelers is Afrina Neopower.
The Impact on the Ecosystem
SUN Mobility does not make vehicles. It makes packs, cabinets and software, and it rents the energy layer to anyone who wants to build around it.
That is a departure from how African e-mobility has worked. Every significant swapping operator on the continent has run a closed loop, selling its own motorcycles, taking its own batteries into its own cabinets. ARC Ride, Ampersand and Roam each built that way, solving the African duty cycle in their own idiom. As we wrote in BodaBodas Part Deux, the standard model has been to import motorcycle kits, mate them to a locally specified pack, and build a proprietary energy network around it. Vertical integration was never a preference. It was the only way to ensure that a vehicle and an energy network can exist at the same time.
The cost is that every operator carries two hard businesses at once. One is building a motorcycle durable enough for 240 kg payloads and bad roads. The other is building a capital-intensive energy utility. Very few companies are good at both, and the ones that have tried have generally been better at one than the other.
Ampersand broke ranks first. In December 2025, it opened its network to third parties, with Wylex Mobility building the Roroship around Ampersand’s 3.24 kWh LFP pack. We called it the first of its type in Africa and a genuinely good move.
SUN Mobility’s proposition is that same idea generalised and heavily capitalised. Ajay Goel, Co-Founder and CEO for international business, frames the value in the release: “Manufacturers get a capital-efficient path to scale, fleet operators get flexibility, and financiers get confidence that the vehicles they fund will remain supported by an independently operated network.“
The financier point is the important one. A bank lending against a boda boda in Nairobi is underwriting an asset whose usefulness depends on a startup staying solvent enough to keep the cabinets stocked. That is why asset finance in African e-mobility has been slow, expensive, and concentrated among a handful of development lenders. An independent, multi-brand energy layer shifts the credit question from “will this company survive” to “will this network survive,” and those are different risks carrying different prices. If SUN Mobility proves it out, the effect on the cost of capital across the sector will be worth more than any single fundraise.
What Vivo Energy actually brings
While the initial deployment is only 35 stations, SUN Mobility is effectively getting access to a network of over 4,200 Shell and Engen service stations across 29 countries on the continent. That’s access. We would refrain from calling it a potential deployment, mostly because batteries are capital-intensive, and knowing SUN Mobility, they like to take things slow at the start and then accelerate fast.
But look beyond just the potential battery swapping location provider, and Vivo’s value is real and specific. Riders already stop at these sites. The sites have grid connections, security, staff, lighting, and drainage, and they sit where traffic naturally concentrates. Site acquisition is the slowest and most underestimated part of building a swap network in an African city, and Vivo removes most of that friction across 29 markets at once. Hans Paulsen, Vivo Energy’s EVP for East and South Africa, makes the structural argument cleanly in the release: “A shared forecourt serves every fuel brand today, and a shared swapping network can serve every vehicle brand tomorrow.“
Fuel retail has flirted with African e-mobility before without much scale. SUN is not the first battery-swapper to use petrol bunks to host its swap stations. TotalEnergies Kenya has hosted Ampersand swap points in Nairobi for several years, reaching three sites. What is different here is ownership. Vitol owns Vivo Energy and holds equity in SUN Mobility, so the two sides are not negotiating an arm’s-length hosting agreement on a site-by-site basis. That alignment is the reason to expect this partnership to convert further than earlier ones did.
Vivo’s own logic is straightforward. If two-wheeler electrification proceeds at anything like the pace forecast for East and West Africa, a fuel retailer without an electric offer loses its most frequent customer segment. Hosting swap cabinets is an inexpensive hedge that keeps the forecourt relevant, and it converts a fuel station into a multi-energy hub without Vivo having to build any of the technology itself.
The Blind Mate Debate
As in India, the SUN Mobility batteries in Africa use blind-mate connectors. Batteries slide into a cabinet to mate with bottom-fed connectors. Even a blind person can do that….theoretically. New entrants like Kofa and Zeno also do the same. These are semi-automated stations that do not require manual intervention. In India, vehicle operators on the SUN Mobility network carry an NFC key fob that unlocks the cabinets. Moreover, the vehicle battery bay is unlocked only when it is within Bluetooth range of the station, providing an IoT-driven, elegant, foolproof security and convenience solution.
However, Africa is predominantly corded. Over the years, I have seen market leader Spiro and old-timers Ampersand and Roam use corded connectors. The swapping stations need to be manned, and in some cases, such as Spiro, the battery pack is too heavy to be swapped without assistance. The reason for the corded connectors was always attributed to Africa’s harsh operating environment.
Over the years, I suspect that it has become a heritage issue, and as deployment numbers increase every month, the issue will keep on compounding. It’s a slippery rabbit hole that one day would be a CAPEX catastrophe.
I never found corded connectors a satisfactory or forward-looking solution. As an operating climate, India is equally harsh, and the abuse is just as intense. Corded connectors slow down things at the stations and result in longer wait times. Customer satisfaction, in a market where time is money, goes for a toss. Sticking to corded connectors with manual assistance in battery swapping is like saying that Africa will never evolve.
SUN’s Challenges
The harder question is whether the economics transfer. Scale in swapping and profitability in swapping have not historically been the same thing. We have written extensively about Gogoro, which built the most technically accomplished swapping network in the world and saw energy revenues grow steadily while hardware revenues collapsed, resulting in a net loss. The lesson is not that swapping fails. It is that a business which gives up the vehicle margin has only the energy margin to live on, and an energy business with a fixed asset base needs utilisation above a hard threshold.
SUN Mobility gives up the vehicle margin by design. It is not a competence they want to pursue. Utilisation is therefore the only question that matters. SUN Mobility’s calling is that its Quick Interchange Stations are high-throughput and thermally controlled and would drive up utilisation. The network roll-out as well as the vehicle supply and sales by partners would together determine whether there is enough demand and enough supply in the market.
There is a related capital point. At 1.8 packs per vehicle in circulation, one in the bike and an average of 0.8 float in the swapping station, 160,000 vehicles imply around 288,000 packs. At 2.1 kWh per pack, that is roughly 600 MWh of battery held as working capital, or close to USD 60 million in pack inventory alone at current LFP prices.
Vitol and Helios are exactly the shareholders who can fund that. It is worth understanding that the five-year target is as much an investment case as a deployment plan.
What it changes for everyone else
We have argued for some time that Africa’s electric motorcycle contest was one-sided. When Spiro took the largest fundraise in the history of African e-mobility, we wrote that it had raised more capital than every other African player combined and deployed more motorcycles than all of them put together. Our funding analysis this year put the equity gap at roughly USD 455 million against under USD 100 million for the entire rest of the field.
InsightEV – Global Electric Mobility
When Zeno closed its USD 25 million Series A in March, we called it the most significant African funding announcement of the year and said the sector needed at least two serious players for the long term. Even then, the qualifier was “not counting Spiro.”
Spiro’s position is not directly threatened by this launch. Its deployed fleet is already creeping up to what SUN Mobility hopes to reach across the whole continent in five years with its ten partners. Spiro operates across six seven eight countries, and Equitane can keep writing cheques. Recently, they have also reached the inflection point where European impact funds can no longer ignore Spiro.
Then there is Gagan Gupta, the founder of Spiro and the Chairman of Equitane, the fund that owns Spiro. His audacious vision for Spiro and Africa is unparalleled. As a result, his actions are of a different scale. He is talking about cell manufacturing on the continent when the others are merely putting up swapping stations.
What SUN Mobility challenges is the assumption underneath Spiro’s valuation and everyone else’s: that owning the energy network is a durable moat.
If an independent, well-capitalised, manufacturer-agnostic energy layer establishes itself, a captive network stops being purely an asset and becomes partly a cost that a competitor does not have to carry. The vehicle becomes the commodity. The operator with the best vehicle economics wins rather than the operator with the biggest cabinet estate.
That pressure lands hardest on the middle of the market — operators carrying the full cost of a captive network without the volume to amortise it. Ampersand saw it early and opened its network. Roam went the other way, selling packs outright and building for fast charging rather than swaps. Zeno hedged by building swapping, fast charging and home charging into one ecosystem, and its July appointments, two senior hires, both on the charging side, suggest it is now weighting that hedge deliberately. If SUN Mobility’s open network reaches useful density in Nairobi, Zeno’s fast-charging tilt looks less like a retreat from swapping and more like a decision not to compete on a layer somebody else will fund.
Kenya is also the right place to test this and the hardest one. Motorcycle sales there went through a historic slump and have only recently begun recovering; electric is estimated to be approaching a tenth of new motorcycle sales, and more than fifty e-mobility startups already operate in the market. Nothing about Nairobi is easy, which is precisely why proving it there means something.
What to watch?
Whether the ten manufacturers ship. Showing up at a launch event and being available at a dealer with financing are separated by homologation, duty treatment, a large ground team, spares, and service. Not all have vehicles ready. Not all have business plans ready. Some of them showed up looking for distributors.
Some will fall through the cracks.
Spiro, Zeno, Ampersand, or Roam have worked, or not worked, but their sole headache has been to create the sales and service infrastructure for one brand and one product line. For Sun Mobility to succeed, all 10 partners would have to do the same work.
“Katongole” and Employee Costs
“What’s with the Katongole?” I pinged Gaurav Anand, SUN Mobility’s country head in Kenya, and their most important guy in the field. He had just added the moniker, “aka Katongole,” to his LinkedIn profile.
“It’s a Ugandan term referring to someone respected who creates something afresh,” he responded.
That, to me, illustrates the importance of what an electric energy network is to a country like Uganda and its huge boda boda population. That, to me, also tells me that Gaurav is someone with his job in his heart and wears his heart on his sleeve. SUN Mobility would need that passion to drive the expansion needed.
But till last year, Gaurav was with Spiro.
In turn, Spiro’s new Group CEO, Anant Badjatya, was the CEO of Indofast Energy before he called the packers to his apartment and moved to Spiro in Dubai.
Those are not two isolated cases. These are merely the top executives. More movement is happening in the middle and lower ranks. The race for talent in Africa will heat up with SUN Mobility’s entry. Till now, Spiro, and to some extent Zeno, were the only ones to offer generous remuneration on the continent. SUN Mobility will heat that race. The cost of talent will climb. Business plans have to accommodate that.